Billionaire David Ho admits to confining prostitute, drug possession

By Neal Hall and Kathryn Blaze Carlson

The billionaire tycoon took the prostitute to McDonald’s — the Keg Steakhouse was already closed for the night — then paid her to have sex for five hours in his Vancouver mansion, where they role-played and smoked cocaine.

The night took a turn near 5 a.m., a Vancouver court heard Thursday, when the woman was forced to stay against her will: She tried to escape the man’s grasps and called her father screaming, ‘Dad, help me, I’m on a bad date!” She was able to flee in the snow to a neighbour’s home after leaping over a 2.5-metre fence.

David Ho — a famously private mogul with stakes in myriad industries and connections to the world’s rich and powerful— on Thursday pleaded guilty in a plea bargain to three charges, including unlawful confinement of the woman he met online in December, 2008, and possessing an unregistered loaded Glock 9-mm. pistol.

He was spared jail time, sentenced to one year probation and ordered to receive drug counselling. He was also ordered to complete 45 hours of community service.

The scion of one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest and most illustrious families had for years maintained a low profile despite his enterprising ventures, including the now-defunct Harmony Airlines that once promised to be a silver-spoon service in the skies. After moving to Canada in 1984, he went on a spending spree and soon owned a golf club, a security firm, a fitness centre, a yacht brokerage company, and a luxury car dealership with rights to Jaguar, Porsche and Rolls-Royce.

Before long, he was serving on the Vancouver Police Board. He donated hundreds of thousands to the provincial Liberals, and even hired a former B.C. finance minister as president of Harmony, his dream airline that folded in 2007.

But by the fall of 2009 he was in the headlines for another reason, both for the charges laid in the 2008 incident and his explanation for several police run-ins involving drugs and prostitutes.

“I’m addicted to helping them,” Mr. Ho told the Vancouver Province at the time, referring to prostitutes in the Downtown Eastside. “It’s worse when it rains … that’s when I get into the car and go looking for them.”

Police at the time called that reasoning “hogwash,” and Mr. Ho later admitted he used unreasonable force to detain the woman in his multi-million-dollar mansion in Shaughnessy, the city’s wealthiest neighbourhood.

Still, he maintains in a statement of facts that he offered to drive the woman home and only grabbed at her out of concern she would run away into the cold without a jacket or shoes. The woman, the court heard, suffered agoraphobia and a fear of being murdered.

Mr. Ho’s life is one that has caught Canadians’ attention — whenever, that is, he provides a glimpse of it. The 60-year-old father of three, who counts movie star Jackie Chan among his friends, has said he sometimes sleeps as little as 10 hours a week — a chronic insomniac. He reportedly bought a police car once used as a movie prop and parked it outside his home as a scarecrow to burglars.

He told journalist Peter C. Newman in 2005 that when he first arrived to Canada with his then-wife, he thought he would find horses to ride because it was in the Wild West. Instead, he was “most impressed — it was like being in Disneyland,” he said.

Mr. Ho has said he began his career as a teenager sorting tobacco leaves in his grandfather’s warehouse, and was later educated at a prep school in Virginia, before studying at the University of Richmond. He holds passports to several countries.

On Thursday, his lawyer and the Crown asked the court to spare him jail time, to instead sentence him to one year on probation and drug rehab. Those close to Mr. Ho told the Vancouver Province in 2009 that he is no criminal, and is actually quietly helping young women break free from the gritty underworld of drugs and prostitution.

Mr. Ho apparently wrote cheques for up to $25,000 for women who have lost their teeth so they can get dental work. The Province also reported he was said to have helped a University of British Columbia professor get her daughter back from the Downtown Eastside, and to have rescued a woman in the clutches of a violent pimp by arranging her return to Hungary.

At least twice before the 2009 charges were laid, Vancouver police dealt with Mr. Ho and sex-trade workers.

In one incident, a prostitute called police saying Mr. Ho was holding her in his downtown apartment, and when police arrived they investigated and found crack pipes. On another occasion, Mr. Ho was pulled over by police in east Vancouver, where they found two well-known drug-addicted prostitutes and allegedly found cocaine in his car. No charges were laid in either instance.

Mr. Ho, who was also arrested last year when a switchblade was found in his luggage at the Vancouver airport, was smiling when he entered the courtroom Thursday. He sat silently next to his lawyers as the statement of facts was read into the record.

Mr. Ho rose and faced the gallery and issued a brief apology. The woman was not present.